About the Companion

The H.E. Bates Companion provides information about every known published writing by the English author Herbert Ernest Bates (1905-1974).

The Companion includes all items listed in Peter Eads's H.E. Bates: A Bibliographical Study (1990), additional items unknown to Eads (eight stories and numerous non-fiction pieces), and a large number of book reviews intentionally excluded from his work. The Companion does not attempt to duplicate all information in the Eads bibliography, such as bibliographical collation and description of particular editions.

The Companion records 23 novels and over 300 stories (of which about 30 may be considered novellas). It also records six major non-fiction works, three volumes of autobiography, and a very large number of minor non-fiction works (some published separately but most published in serials).

The Companion includes many prefaces and introductions to Bates's published volumes, and many reviews of his works when first published. Users should note that contemporary commentary on a particular story will frequently be found in reviews of one or more of the collections in which a story appeared.

Acknowledgements:

Much help creating this Companion has been given by Dean Baldwin, Richard Holroyd, Phil Stephensen-Payne, Martin Rowsell, Julia Robinson, Chris Eads, and Andrew Whitehead. Josh Alper, Tara Gooden, Tracey Walker, and April Zilber at the University of California, Santa Cruz have provided invaluable assistance in obtaining materials and scans from other repositories.

In recent years, I have been grateful for a wonderful collaboration on this project with members of the Bates family -- Brian Wicks, Victoria Wicks, and Tim Bates -- and the assistance of Inam Ulhaq, friend of H. E. Bates's great-grandaughter Madelaine. As a team, we have discovered hundreds of new items by Bates, obtained copies and created readable scans, and found new first-publication dates for dozens of items. Inam has contributed countless corrections and has provided input for a large number of the book review entries. The Bates estate has generously allowed the loading of PDFs of virtually all of Bates's non-fiction items, a great boon for Bates scholars and fans.

I am also grateful for the long-term support of this project from the University Library, University of Santa Cruz. Initial conversion of the project from one computer system to another was done by Paul Ferlito. I am tremendously grateful to Bryn Kanar (900monkeys.net) for ongoing assistance with the current web presentation, data issues, and with the overall look of the site.